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PentestChain: A Cost-Aware, MCP-Orchestrated Framework for Automated Penetration Testing with Free-Tier LLMs

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Sep 16, 2026 · UTC

AI-driven penetration testing has been demonstrated with premium frontier models such as GPT-4, but the per-engagement token cost makes continuous, automated testing unaffordable for the smaller organisations that need it most. This paper presents PentestChain, a ten-phase automated penetration testing framework that couples a curated, deterministic exploit map with a cost-aware AI cascade-a local Ollama model (qwen2.5-7b) first, then free-tier OpenRouter and Cerebras, with a rule-based fallback that always produces output-and exposes the full pipeline through a Model Context Protocol (MCP) se

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